Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Sagas and crime fiction: A witness for the prosecution

Fired by my recent discovery that Josef Škvorecký also found affinities between Icelandic sagas and crime fiction, I dug out my copy of The Sagas of Icelanders, published in 2000 by, suitably enough, Viking.

Imagine the tingle of recognition when I read this, from the introduction:

"Saga heroes occupy a social space on the edges of society. The heroes of three of the sagas, The Saga of Grettir the Strong, Gisli Sursson's Saga and The Saga of Hord and the People of Holm, are in fact outlaws. Gunnar Hamundarson of Hlidarendi in Njal's Saga is also technically a criminal when he is killed. Most of the saga heroes are just barely on one side of the other of the law, but it also seems to be true that the law itself is being tested along with the finest men."

Substitute shorter American names for the long Nordic ones, and Raymond Chandler could have written that.

9 Comments:

Maybe I'm thinking of something else but wasnt it only technically murder if you killed someone on the quiet. If you did it in broad daylight then it wasnt murder because it was assumed that the murdered man or woman's family would institute a blood feud.

Dorte, does that mean you're recovering from the flu but are not all the way back yet?

In any case, I discovered that I've been using a Danish word for years without knowing it. My newspaper's computer system has an editing mode that lets reporters and editors mark messages that are visible to us on our screens but don't ger printed in the paper. Our notations to indicate a new passage inserted into a story for a later edition are "nu" at the neginning of the passage and "endnu" at the end.

What do the sagas say about your ancestors? That they were farmers, businessmen and lawyers, occasionally femmes fatales, that they had a deadpan sense of humor, and that they sometimes killed people. Oh, and that murder isn't the only crime in Njal's Saga. There's also one arson, of course.

And you seem to know my ancestors quite well! (Though the ones I know about were mostly farmhands and servants, nothing remotely as interesting as a femme fatale - there were a few fishermen who stole wheat and went to jail for it 200 years ago)

That is an interesting observation you have made. All ancient sagas have material for adventure stories, be it the Old English Beowulf's chase and fight with the monster Grendel in an underwater lair or the heroes in our Indian epics. Lord Rama in the Indian Ramayana, whose wife Sita was abducted by the demon king Ravana, followed a trail of ornaments which she dropped through the forests, to find out the whereabouts of his enemy. That's detection work for you!In our other great epic, Mahabharata, the good Pandava brothers are sleeping while the bad Kaurava brothers set their wax-house on fire. Even that needs some detection to find out. Cloak-and-dagger (rather, sword) stuff abounded, as did conspiracies and their ultimate detection and punishment.

Lord Rama's detection sounds much like that Voltaire wrote about in "Zadig". Foreshadowings of crime fiction are everywhere.

The conflict between groups of brothers is about all I knew of the Mahabharata. Crime and families so often go together, even before American hard-boiled stories.

Interesting mention of Beowulf. When I read the scenes of fear and anticipation inside the hall of Grendel on the outside, I knew I was reading one of the world's first great horror stories. Every slasher movie owes its scenes of frightened teenagers to the great classic of Old English poetry.

About Me

This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly.
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